Montgomery "Monty" Ball, known to growers everywhere as Subcool, and to some as Dave Bowman, was a breeder who believed genetics belonged to the people who grow them.

Around 2001 in Oregon, he and a handful of friends started what became TGA Genetics, Team Green Avenger. Instead of locking his best plants away, he mailed seeds to growers around the world and asked them to pop them, grow them, and report back. Jack the Ripper, Space Queen, Vortex, Querkle and dozens more came out of that open way of working, and they still grow in gardens everywhere. He wrote it all down in his books, Dank and Dank 2.0.

He taught for free. He put his Super Soil recipe on camera, stood on stage at seminars and the School of Dank, and for ten years hosted The Weed Nerd, a show named so that nobody would ever feel too dumb to learn. High Times inducted him into the Seed Bank Hall of Fame in 2009, Vortex won Best Sativa at the 2010 Cannabis Cup, and in 2017 he received the Lester Grinspoon Lifetime Achievement Award.

In 2013 he was diagnosed with Alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, a genetic disease that slowly took his lungs. In October 2017 the Tubbs Fire destroyed his Santa Rosa home and about four million seeds, sixteen years of work. He gave the relief money raised for him to the Soil King, to help other growers who had lost everything.

He started over in Arizona, growing clean medicine for patients and still teaching on camera until his last episode in October 2019. He died on February 1, 2020.

In his own words, to the people who watched him: "It's been a blast teaching you guys how to grow. I've met so many friends through YouTube. An entire community has been created around this thing."

That community is his legacy. Pop it, grow it, pass it on.